


I, Eliot Spencer...

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Dark, Dark Past, Drugs, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Kidnapping, Past Violence, Psychological Torture, Regret, Snipers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 07:59:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13267119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: In the aftermath of the confrontation on Il Falcone Maltese, Eliot is taken prisoner by Mikel Dayan and delivered to Marcus Starke.  Starke intends to use Eliot's past to psychologically destroy him and through doing so, revenge himself on Nate and Sophie for the events of The Two Live Crew Job.





	I, Eliot Spencer...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [D890MB279](https://archiveofourown.org/users/D890MB279/gifts).



> Prompt 2. I would also love to see something I've toyed with - Eliot is being held captive by an old enemy (anyone or even an OC), and he doesn't know what's real or not around him. He has to try and sort fact from fiction because the enemy is using his love of his team against him. Something where the enemy may show his team members being killed one by one as torture since physical torturing Eliot won't satisfy his need for revenge. Then Eliot escaping, but not sure what or where he should be or if what he saw was real.
> 
> This one kind of bent in on itself, as things tend to when I get too far into Eliot's head and start messing around. I hope you enjoy the result!

_“What I need to control is not out there.”_

Eliot Spencer had no illusions about who and what he was. He couldn’t afford them. Not when people’s lives hung in the balance.

_I, Eliot Spencer, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship. Faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die against all manner of folks._

_So help me God._

God help him indeed – he’d never said the words out loud to Nate, but they’d grown in his heart as his affection for the man and belief in his crusade had grown. Eliot might not have been able to change what he was, but he could choose what he did with it.

_“Everything you touch dies.”_

Nate had been shot. He’d been shot and Eliot had missed it, and because he was following orders instead of doing his duty he had no idea now if Nate was alive or dead.

_“Everything you touch dies.”_

The sentiment had always been there, since the beginning – since he’d fallen asleep at his sister’s bedside while she lay dying with the flu. He was twelve – almost the oldest – and his parents had trusted him to watch her while they tended to the other one. Mary was younger, the more fragile of the two, and the one everybody was most worried about.

She was the one everyone was most worried about, but in the end it was Nina who died first. Died because Eliot had failed in his duty to guard her.

 _Just like Nate._  
**********************************  
It wasn’t her place to say anything, but Mikel had always been very bad at concealing her emotions. It also didn’t help that Marcus Starke had little to recommend him as an employer beyond the depth of his bank account.

“You know you don’t have to stick around for this part.” He was studying the monitor that displayed Eliot’s vitals. Mikel didn’t fully understand what it was saying, and she was reasonably sure Starke didn’t either – but it was obviously important to him that he look like he did. As far as she was concerned it was more important that the men in the white lab coats currently swarming Eliot in the next room knew what they were doing.

“And when he gets free and is about to snap your neck for this, you will be happy I stayed,” she told Starke dispassionately.

He turned, and at the edge of her vision Mikel saw him open his mouth to respond, but then he closed it again without saying a word. “Just stay out of the way,” he warned, signaling one of the men in the next room.

The man who hurried to join them was the doctor Starke had hired to oversee Eliot’s condition. “The patient is in full REM, Mr. Starke. We’re introducing a substance to level his blood pressure a bit more, and then we will be ready to start the subliminal direction.”

They were already settling noise-cancelling headphones in place, despite the doctor’s cautions. Through them would be fed information Starke had paid a small fortune to obtain – information on Eliot’s past, particularly his kills. Information Mikel suspected had never been shared in its entirety with anyone before Starke and his bank account had inserted themselves into the story.

“A bullet would have been cleaner,” she muttered, folding her arms across her stomach and trying once again to quell her discomfort with the situation.

“I’m not planning on killing him,” Starke snapped, sounding almost petulant. “If he dies, Sophie will never know how much he suffered.” He huffed out a quiet laugh, but it sounded sick to her ears somehow. “Breaking him serves my aims much more than killing him.”

 _You never should have taken the job._ Eliot didn’t matter to Starke, except in the way he mattered to a woman like Sophie Devereaux. He would be destroyed not for his own sake, but for how much it could hurt someone else.

Mikel Dayan was a woman with no illusions about who and what she was, but she had always valued the freedom to choose what she did with it.

This time? _You chose wrong._  
*************************************  
He’d stayed behind them. He’d made a point of it – always at the back of the group – and Eliot had shifted naturally to the front to compensate.

_I, Eliot Spencer, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship…_

_“Everything you touch dies.”_

_He lied to me. How could I be expected to help him if he didn’t trust me to do my job?_

But pushing back against the entirely reasonable question was a deeper, darker truth: _He did trust you in the end, with the only thing that matters._ Eliot’s final orders, delivered in a way he would be expected to respond to: see the team to safety. _No matter what._ Nate didn’t matter, in the end. Only the team mattered. Nate didn’t matter.

 _…except to me._ And Sophie and Parker, and Hardison, and so many more people than the stupid sonofabitch would ever know.

_“Everything you touch dies.”_

The crack of a sniper rifle echoed in his mind – louder than it should have been. “I didn’t fire.”  
**************************************  
The doctor’s assistant passed him a tablet. Mikel watched as he scanned it, his eyes lighting with an excitement that bordered on the obscene, given their circumstances. “His systems are level across the board, and the code phrase is keeping him in check on a subconscious level. In my opinion, we are ready to proceed.”

She had heard Starke talk about the code phrase. It apparently wasn’t enough to put Eliot into a suggestible state. In order to tear apart his psyche they had to convince his subconscious not to fight back against whatever surges of guilt and horror Starke managed to call up. “Everything you touch dies,” she said, as Starke was reaching for the microphone. “What made you settle on that?”

She was banking on Starke’s love of pontification to buy Eliot a few more precious seconds before his torture began in earnest. Short of taking him out herself and guaranteeing she never worked again though, Mikel knew she had no reasonable way to stop him. “He took a lover when he was working for Damien Moreau – a Russian girl named Oksana. Moreau’s enemies eventually pegged the girl as a vulnerability.”

She didn’t need details to know where Starke was taking the tale, and surprisingly enough he didn’t seem inclined to give them. “Whoever did it was good at their trade – by all reports she lasted long enough for Spencer to find her. Witnesses claim that was the last thing she said.”

A shudder of revulsion shivered down Mikel’s spine. “You are…very thorough, Starke,” she finally managed. She had no reasonable way to stop him, but she knew people who could.

Decision made, Mikel waited until Starke turned his attention back to the task at hand before slipping her phone out of her pocket.  
***********************************  
Nate had confided once that the flip side of his ability to bind them together as an unstoppable team was the understanding of what it would take to tear each of them apart. Eliot had always wondered if he knew about the flashes his hitter got from time to time – lightning images where, just for a moment, Eliot understood just how to kill someone.

He’d always rationalized the visions away as being a by-product of what he’d been trained to do, and Nate’s story seemed to support that idea. And if they couldn’t be eliminated, it at least made them bearable.

_“Everything you touch dies.”_

_Her bright hair was sticky with the blood that seemed to be everywhere, and her blue eyes stared off into eternity. In his mind Eliot had cut the rope that she relied on to keep her safe, to keep her breathing. He’d watched her fall from a vantage point on the roof, and been on the ground when she hit, at her side as she drew her last breath in this world._

“No!” His final orders – see them safe – and he’d failed.

_His shoulders were wider than when they’d first met, his body taking on definition as he pursued the training regimen Eliot had laid out for him. A lifetime of being weak and scared was driving him, but in the end it couldn’t save him. One quick, deft knife-stroke, left to right, and fear made the blood pump thick and hot until there was nothing left to flow._

Nowhere left to run.

_No matter how much she might wish otherwise, the steel in her soul never bled into her bones. Not to a degree that would keep her safe from the likes of Eliot Spencer. Twisted just so, her neck would break in his grip. It would be quick – no time for pain – and he would be looking in her eyes when he did it._

He owed her that much.

 _“Everything you love dies.”_  
*****************************************  
“He’s awake!”

Oblivion had followed the blood and death and the accusing stares of the dead in his mind – a darkness so absolute Eliot had accepted that he wouldn’t escape it.

That he shouldn’t escape it.

But then there was light again, light that made his head hurt behind his eyelids. And hands – fumbling, grasping, desperate, but offering love and stability instead of more pain.

And a voice he’d never thought to hear again this side of death. “Back up – give the doctor some room!” Eliot came up at the sound of Nate’s voice, eyes wide and searching for that face, the one thing in the world that could anchor him with a look, with the simple sound of his name. “Eliot.”

_I, Eliot Spencer, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship…_

Nate was paler than he should have been; an open robe over pajama pants showing a thick white bandage wrapping his stomach. “Tranquilizer. They took you on the dock once everyone else was on the helicopter. Mikel Dayan was on a nearby roof, working for Marcus Starke.” He paused, and Eliot could feel the tangle of his leader’s emotions like an electric current against his skin. “We’ve been looking for you for nearly a week.”

 _We…_ “You played us,” Eliot managed. “You played _me._ ”

He didn’t know if Nate’s injuries helped his case, but the mastermind looked more openly embarrassed than Eliot had ever seen him. “The price was too high. I thought I was doing the best for all of us, but…the price was too high.”

Sophie’s hand was gentle on Eliot’s bare shoulder, drawing his attention. “They were in your head. Hardison is trying to reconstruct everything Starke ordered done, but based on what Mikel told us the intent was that you not recover.”

_“Everything you touch dies.”_

Awareness of how easily things could have gone the other way spiked through the hitter. Trying to slow his suddenly racing heartbeat, Eliot groped behind him, until his hand was taken up in Hardison’s own. “I got you, man.”

Parker perched on the end of his bed – for once not jostling him or aggravating any of Eliot’s physical injuries. “We all do.”

Looking across at Nate, Eliot found what he needed to finally anchor himself and trust in the love and support that surrounded him. “No matter what happens,” the mastermind told him, “no matter what that bastard did, he can’t have you, Eliot.”

_”I, Eliot Spencer…”_


End file.
